Tide Pool at Midnight

At midnight the laundromat blooms like a tide pool, portholes of glass turning shirts into slow moons. Detergent lifts its clean blue weather, and coins rain briefly in the metal throat of a machine.

A bus sighs outside, kneeling to no one, while steam writes cursive on the windows and erases it. An old woman folds galaxies with practiced wrists, matching socks by touch, as if reading Braille for tomorrow.

In the back, a boy waits on the spin cycle and studies the map of stains leaving his father's coat. Each rotation loosens a winter from the seams; water remembers every road-salt night and lets it go.

When dawn unbuttons the fluorescent hum, we step out warm, carrying baskets of weather. The street is still damp with dark, and the city smells briefly of rain that chose to stay.